The
children were working last semester on balancing their bodies on various
objects and in different situations. We
wanted to continue with the idea of balance with the children and see if they
were still interested and still used various strategies to achieve their goals.
We decided to put long pieces of
tape onto the ground. This wouldn’t
really be a concrete object to balance
on off the ground, but the children would still need to use strategies to keep
their feet on the tape.
We also played a video for the
children of a person walking on a tight rope above the ground. We wanted the children to see what kinds of
strategies the person used to balance his body and we talked about them
together at whole group time before we placed the tape onto the ground. We talked about how the person was moving his
arms and his feet.
During
the lesson, the children tried to mimic what they saw with the person walking
on the tight rope. Some of the children
chose to walk on the tape, one foot in front of the other, while others chose
to walk sideways on the tape. One child tried
to stretch her legs to fit the two different lines of tape on the ground so one
foot was walking along a separate line of tape.
We plan to bring the balance beam
into the classroom next time but we want to have it against the wall. This will give the children another
opportunity to balance without as much assistance so they can be more independent
as they walk along the beam.
